Getting Here Part XII: Impossible Isn't in God's Vocabulary

Do you believe your life can change on a dime? It certainly can change on a ten-minute prayer. Before the month was out our old friends had decided we needn't come visit anymore. We were different, they told us. I guess they meant we weren't fun now.

After September 1975 we were pretty busy. In a rather short time I was assisting in controlling the sound equipment on Sunday Morning, ushering, on the visitation committee, teaching Vacation Bible school, acting as a leader for Boys' Brigade and Lois and I were elected to lead the Adult fellowship.

In 1976 Campus Crusade for Christ launched the international outreach called, "I Found It!" It found me and named me the Publicity Coordinator for South Jersey. This entailed meeting with ministers of various churches and with media outlets. I also found it involved making cold calls and door-to-door evangelism, things way out of my comfort zone.  A few years earlier I had been visiting churches to tell ministers they were preaching a lie and now I was knocking on doors of perfect strangers to explain what Christ could mean in their lives.

By 1977, Lois and I were Youth Ministers for Word of Life international. That is we in the photo at the top. I'm the guy in sunglasses toward the left and Lois is resting her head on my shoulder. With us are other leaders and some of the kids we served. No one here is lifting any glass in a toast. What is being held are paper towels and Windex. We were headed out to a parking lot to clean window shields, not as a fund raiser. No, we never took money for our Christian Service outings. We simply washed car windows and left a tract or if possible spoke to the driver.

If anyone reading this has ever been a youth leader they will confirm it is a very time consuming endeavor. Most of our time outside of our jobs was taken up planning and conducting meetings and outings for these teenagers. All this activity was beginning to overwhelm my wife. We weren't to learn until more than a decade later that my wife suffered from a problem that made life often difficult for her to deal with. Nonetheless she had committed to this because she knew I wanted to do it. There was also that factor that we would never be parents ourselves, so why not devote our time to these children?

God has impeccable timing. Between September 1975 through September 1977 we had been deeply involved in a lot for new babes in Christ. You talk about a crash course in James 1:22-25, this was it. But sometimes in youthful enthusiasm we did more than is healthy. But God found a way to slow us down.

Lois said, "I think I'm pregnant."

"How?" Not as dumb a question as it sounds. "I thought you had your tubes tied?"

"No, I didn't."

There was a problem. When we visited her gynecologist he refused to take her case. It was impossible for her to carry a baby to term. She was foolish getting pregnant again. It was a risk to her own life and there was no way with her history and scarring that this baby could survive.

There was a doctor at the church who heard of this situation and he arranged for her care. It was going to be difficult. She was going to have to stay in bed for the term. She could walk from the bedroom to the living room and to the bathroom when necessary, but nothing else. She had to stay off her feet, no cooking, no housework, no going out. And no guarantees this would work.

So I arranged a control center in the living room. From the sofa, where she would lay, she could control the TV. I put a cooler next to her with some food and drink so she could have lunch or snack. I took care of the housekeeping and making meals.

Fortunately, on the meal front, a group of people at Laurel Hill Bible Church formed a prayer group to pray for Lois and the baby. The women began bringing us meals in the evening.

In the dreaded fifth month, late February 1978, Lois called for me. She was losing it. I drove her the several miles to the hospital in a snow storm. Here we go again, this was a movie I'd seen too many times. There she was, in a labor room, a monitor beeping off the little heartbeats and an IV in her arm with chemicals to retard labor.

This went on a few days. A doctor came to us and said there was an experimental drug he would like to try if we agreed. It was something new called Steroids. He thought it might help strengthen the baby's lungs, but it was experimental and he couldn't say there weren't risks.

We said do it.

A couple more days passed and then the doctors came to me and said my wife was risking infection if they tried to retard delivery any longer. This baby had to come out.

And out she came yelling her little head off. The Steroids may have worked, they could hear her crying long before her head appeared. She just didn't like being wakened up so early in the morning and never would. She weighted just over 5 pounds and went right into an incubator. Her weight would drop and so Lois came home leaving the baby behind. She couldn't be released until she got back to five pounds.

Oh, how the nursery staff laughed at us when that day came and we tried to dress that little bitty girl for the first time. We had gotten the smallest baby clothes we could find, but even this was too large. We should have gotten doll dresses, I guess.

We named her Laurel Christine. Laurel in honor of those at Laurel Hill Bible Church who prayed her into this world and Christine (Little Christian) as her middle name because Christ was central to our lives.

Laurel was a person that it was said could not be born. She was and she is a very nice young lady now with a passion for helping those who can't help themselves, both human and animal. (Right - Laurel aiding Sandy victims.) Yet some may credit this to the doctor's putting Lois to bed or the injection of steroids or some other aspect of modern medicine. Some may, but Laurel's birth is not the end of this story.

To be continued...

 Laurel as VetTech at SPCA

Getting Here Part X: God But A Heartbeat Away

Perhaps the direction of my life in the first half of the 1970s was reflected in my changing look. At the beginning of that decade I had a certain fresh-face look. My hair was trimmed from what it was in our Hippie phase

As I slipped further into a life of pleasure-seeking and anger at those who criticized such living my look darkened. I let my hair grow out again and also stopped shaving.

By 1974 I appeared quite the anarchist.  I was also now in even another job and we had made two more changes of address. Since leaving ARCo in May 1969 I had worked for Philadelphia Gum as a bubblegum welder, North American Publishing Company as circulation manager, Lincoln bank as Operations Accounting Supervisor and Olson Brothers as Office Manager and Cost Accountant.  Now I was a year with Welded Tube Company of America as Assistant Controller.

We had given up our apartment in Aldan because Olson Brothers was planning to relocate in New Jersey. We moved to the Cherry Hill Towers to be closer to the new factory, but then Olson's folded operations instead and I found a new job and we moved to Chalet at Ski Mountain, on the edge of Pine Hill and near Clementon, NJ.

We continued our friendship with the couple from Aldan and so there was little change in our lifestyle. However we ended the visits with the other couple because Lois was suspecting they were hinting we do engage in wife-swapping. Also in those years we lost two more babies in the early months of pregnancy. Lois was having more pronounced periods of depression. I was urging her to have her tubes tied before her health suffered.

We traveled a lot, went to concerts a lot, drank a lot and engaged in risky sexual behavior. Then in 1975 on one of our vacation trips I noticed she was getting sick in the mornings. She finally told me she was pregnant again, number seven.

The doctor was dubious, but did his best. I don't think he performed a Shirodkar procedure again, but can't remember for certain. Lois did have this procedure performed previously because it was determined she had an incompetent cervix, but it proved unsuccessful and that baby was lost. Nonetheless, things were looking okay this time. She made it through the fourth month and was well into the fifth, but then it happened. She told me she felt she was going to lose it and I took her to the hospital.

They put her in a labor room and hooked up an IV drip. They hoped to retard the labor and give the baby time to develop further. She was alone in this room for nearly a week. Every day after work I came and sat with her.

On a table near her bed there was a monitor. It recorded the babies heartbeat. Do you know when a heartbeat is first detectable? In the fourth week of the fetus the heart can be heard. At that point the brain is forming its five sections and all the vital organs have formed. The baby is a human from the moment of fertilization, which is the point when it has all the DNA to determine its makeup and from conception the sex of the baby is known. From that point it is dividing and developing and two weeks after that it has a face.

Much of the time spent in that room there was silence, but not completely. There was the sound of the baby's heartbeat all the time. It sounded strong. It sounded like someone who was fighting very hard to live. 

Near the end of that week the doctors had to allow the labor to proceed and a baby girl was born doomed to die. We would have named her Amy. 

I was sent to a waiting room while that delivery and death took place. I sat in the waiting room and somehow I could still hear that beating heart. I know it is hard for some to understand, but every beat I imagined told me there was a God. Hearing that baby struggling to live made me understand that life could not have been just a chance accident. I didn't know exactly what God was, but I could not do anything at that moment but believe in a creator. 

When we went home, once again just the two of us, it was with a feeling of great emptiness. My wife was as low as I ever saw her. She didn't want to get out of bed. She was crying. She talked of suicide.
I did not know what to do. 

I found myself making a suggestion I never thought I'd make. It would change my life.

To be continued...

The last picture is a fetus at 15 weeks.

Getting Here Part IX: Atheism Has No Holy Days

There are those who call the 'Sixties the Decade of Love and Peace. But exactly when was that? It really wasn't the 'Sixties, not 1960 through 1969 anyway. Do you mark the beginning when the Beatles arrived in 1964? Or did it begin in 1967 at Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love? Psychedelic Art became popular in 1966 along with the Nehru Jacket, was that the beginning? The Hippie-look was everywhere by 1968, but many would count Woodstock as the apogee, not the beginning. If someone asked me to put borders on that period I would say it was from November 22, 1963 to April 30, 1975, the assassination of President Kennedy to the fall of Saigon.

Odd choice some may say, but those events pretty much framed the period because what was so peaceful and loving during that decade?

 There were fiery riots in cities across the nation. There were dogs let loose on people who just wanted to sit down at a lunch counter. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy were all gunned down. The Vietnam War raged through all those years, with the disgrace of My Lai and the chaos at the retreat in Saigon that brought that undeclared war to a disgraceful end. If people wore flowers in their hair in San Francisco for the summer of love in 1966 you had the summer of madness in the Hollywood Hills in 1969 with the Manson murders. If Woodstock symbolized love and peace, then it all fell apart at Altamont in December 1969. Truth is since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden there has never been a decade of love and peace.

Maybe the truth of this occurred on May 4, 1970 when four college students lay dead at Kent State University (picture above).

My own life seemed to reflect that period. 1970 was probably my most successful year as far as my writings being published. My byline was appearing in several different publications, even on the covers and two of my poems had been selected for an anthology of American poetry that year. But as the new year began I was beginning a job at a fourth company since May 1969. By summer we left the roach-infested apartment in Philadelphia and moved to a "luxury" apartment in Aldan, Pa. I don't know if they defined the place that way, but they were luxurious to us after where we had lived.

They were good enough that Joe Watson (pictured left) one of the stars of the Philadelphia Flyers lived there. My wife sometimes met his in the laundry room. She taught that young lady how to operate the machines. The laundry room was sort of the social gathering place for the housewives in that place and my wife made friends with another lady living on our floor. We were soon invited to their apartment for a dinner and we became very close friends with this couple over the next five years.

But not all was so great for us. Since Lois had lost that first baby in 1963 she had suffered two more. Both had happened around the fourth month, so were classified as miscarriages. Now in 1970 she was preggers again. She got through the fourth month this time, but as the fifth month progressed it happened, she said she felt she was going to lose it.

I took her to Fitzgerald-Mercy Hospital. Ironically several years hence I would be working at that hospital, but then it was just the closest. The baby was born, but not strong enough to survive. This was bad enough, but Fitzgerald-Mercy was a Catholic Hospital run by a group of nuns. Because of this the baby was baptized and given last rites. They all told my wife we had to name the child and arrange a funeral. We named him Michael, contacted a funeral director in West Chester and buried the baby in its small casket atop my paternal grandfather's grave in The Grove.

This hit my wife very hard. I wanted her to stop trying to have a child. We were 29 years old and had now lost four babies. It was hopeless, even the doctors were saying so. We were not going to have children. So, what was the purpose of life? I didn't believe in any God or Heaven or Devil either. It was all an accident of time and space, a meaningless chance encounter of some mysterious cosmic chemical. All this meant was you were born, lived several years and died. That was all there was. I might have been changing jobs a lot, but I worked hard when I had them and for what? There was only one reason, to have the money to enjoy this short life we people lived. I decided the purpose of life was pleasure. You know the old motto, "If it feels good, do it." Well, we were going to do it while we were young enough to enjoy it and we would worry about old age when we were older, like after 40.

And so we went for pleasure. We were still good people, we certainly though so. We weren't hurting anyone. My mother wasn't too pleased with our lifestyle, but we were adults and she had no say in our life. Then one day I received a letter from the minister of my parent's church. He said a lady in the congregation had come to him and said my mother was unhappy with how I lived and thought he should try to talk to me.

I hit the ceiling. How dare this lady butt into family business and how dare he criticize. Churches were full of fools and hypocrites. I called him and asked to meet and this began my Atheism activism. Now I began having debates with ministers right in their churches. I wrote letters, often full of blasphemous language. Worse yet, I felt I was winning these debates. When one minister told me it didn't really matter what the members of his congregation believed it was an "ah ha" moment to me. What was he doing preaching anything to them, then, if it didn't matter?

Meanwhile we were getting together regularly with the couple down the hall, the lady my wife met in the laundry room and her husband. He was ten years older than the rest of us and had a somewhat shady background, at least according to him. He had been some kind of mercenary in Vietnam, talked about having killed one or two people somewhere in the past. I don't really think he was making things up. He also had at that time 72 tattoos, and this was long before tattooing became an in-thing.

We went back and forth between our apartments often. Evenings were similar. We played cards and swapped stories, often x-rated and drank. We drank a lot. For some reason alcohol had little effect on me. I could drink anyone under the table, but I'd still be walking a straight line, not slurring my speech and totally conscious and in control. I don't know why, it just was. I never forgot the night before and I never experienced a hangover. It drove my friend nuts. Most of our evenings ended when I either helped guide him back to his apartment or picked him up from where he passed out and carried him to his bedroom.

The four of us went out together. On one occasion in southwest Philadelphia I had to drag him into the car and escape before the police came when he insisted on getting into a game of street hockey with a bunch of kids. He had once played semi-pro hockey. A mother called the police. There were other times I pulled him out of bars before the fights started.

My old gang of friends had disappeared by this time. My closest friend, Joe, was in Vietnam. The rest disappeared as I changed jobs and addresses. So this couple was our social circle now. There wasn't much artistic talk. This was just party time and drinking.

I'm trying to be discreet about my life in this period. There was a Jekyll and Hyde aspect to my life. Family and old friends didn't see this part of it. I was considered as nice, a hard worker, a decent fellow, which I honestly saw myself being as well. The drinking and the sex was private and hurt no one. And as far as I was concern my campaign against religion was a beneficial endeavor. I was exposing this sham called religion.

The couple we befriended at the apartment house weren't our only friends in this period. There was another couple as well. We met them in a lingerie shop. There was drinking involved on these get-togethers, too, but that wasn't the focus. This relationship revolved totally around sex. I don't want to go into details here. I do want to emphasize this was not a wife-swapping situation. I have never had sex with anyone other than my wife in my life. This was games, this was picture-taking, this was spending the night in the same room and having breakfast in the nude. In other words, this was not a healthy friendship.

The road I had taken as the 1970s began and we neared thirty years of age, was drought with sin and danger. If it had continued I do not know where I would be today. Like the pornography it would only grow worse in order to get the same thrill. It is also true my attitude toward the world was not very positive either. Underneath the constant partying was a feeling of worthlessness. My wife was also having more and more bouts of depression.

But something must have changed the direction of my life or I wouldn't be writing this now, right? Something did and it came out of one more great loss.

To be continued...

Getting Here Part VIII; Peep Show into My Soul

One day during the mid-nineteen-sixties an establishment opened on Walnut Street directly opposite Rittenhouse Square. It popped-up between a couple of boutique shops and above the cement stairs between them. It was a different type of business. (These stores are no longer there. Today a large parking garage is on these lots.) It was not fancy. In fact, was quite plain and sparse inside. I had never seen anything like it. The two rooms contained a counter with a clerk who would make change (all quarters), and these old time Nickelodeon machines. I had only seen such contraptions in the Penny Arcade at Dorney Park. There was a viewer atop them that you pressed your eyes into much as you do with binoculars. You dropped a quarter in a slot and a film began. At Dorney Park the films were old cowboy movies. Here each film featured a lone, but different woman. Each woman would dance about a bit and then removed a piece of clothing. This would continue a few minutes and then suddenly the screen would go black.When you dropped in another coin she would pick up where she left off (or should I say, "taken off") peeling her layers. She would soon be only in her underwear and bingo, the screen would darken once more until another quarter plinked down the slot. After dropping in a dollar worth of coin the woman would be cavorting completely naked.

This was the opening salvo in the so-called sexual revolution.

It was not long afterward that the first adult bookstore opened, I believe on West Market Street or perhaps Chestnut. Soon adult bookstores popped up here, there and everywhere. Eventually, perhaps by city edict, these adult bookstores and peepshows coagulated on Arch Street near the Reading Terminal. A whole block between 13th and 12th Streets became one big sex tease. (Picture on right. The last of these was torn down to build the new Pennsylvania  Convention Center in 1993.)

There had been a few so-called "Art Theaters" in Philadelphia, such as the Art Holiday (in its heyday on the right and after it closed in 2007 on the left). We sometimes went to these movie houses. They showed grainy short reels of well-known strippers, such as Blaze Starr [ real name: Fannie Belle Fleming] and Tempest Storm [real name: Annie Blanche Banks] along with the occasional Naturalist (Nudist) flick with the requisite volleyball game. But as the 'sixties progressed, so did these theaters (if you can call this progress). They had to. By the 'sixties even mainline theaters were beginning to show Russ Meyer sexploition films and in the early 'seventies hardcore pornography such as Deep Throat (1972) was playing on main street. The little fringe art theaters soon were featuring live shows.

It was in these places, the peep shows, adult bookstores and art theaters, I spent my spare time and my spare dollars. And over those years I progressed as well. Before these establishments opened I was content with the popular men's magazines such as Playboy. My wife had even given me a subscription to Playboy for Christmas one year. Once I had a taste of what was in those Nickelodeon machines such magazines became too tame. The repetitious centerfolds gave me no thrill and as the years went by that thrill became more and more elusive. The magazines and films had to grow more explicit and then more kinky. Let me just say there is little in the way of deviate sexual acts I have not vicariously indulged in through flickering images or printed page.

Was I addicted to pornography? I know there are psychiatric professionals who hold there is such a thing. Personally I chalk it up to a weakness in character. I liked doing it so I kept doing it not thinking there was anything wrong in doing so. Today we don't want to recognize that people are at fault for their own failings, so we must redefine our behavior as a "disease" of some sort, which absolves us of guilt. We couldn't help it! I think I could have stopped it, but simply didn't want to. 

Nonetheless, The American Society of Addiction Medicine believes there is such a thing as pornography and sexual addiction calling it non-substance addiction and defining it thus:

"Food and sexual behaviors and gambling behaviors can be associated with the "pathological pursuit of rewards"

Furthermore an expert in sexual addiction research has even defined a reason for sexual and pornographic addiction. According to Dr. Patrick Carnes this addiction usually results from a child "growing up in a dysfunctional family, especially one with rigid rules, little warmth and affirmation, abandonment, and sexual or emotional abuse."

Certainly this description comes very close to my own childhood experience, with a couple of notable exceptions. First of all, I was never sexually or physically abused, but I was emotionally abused. The other exception is "one with rigid rules". I grew up with little in the way of rules or guidance. However, there was a lack of warmth and especially affirmation. We were not a hugging family. In fact by my teens I had developed an aversion of being touched. I dreaded those aunts or family friends who insisted on greeting me with a hug, or worse, a kiss. As far as affirmation, there was very little. There was no positive encouragement, but there was a lot of negative criticism and discouragement. Also, although technically there was no abandonment in the usual sense within the family, there was definitely the feeling of abandonment in my psyche. My father had "abandoned" me by going to war. That was something most children of my generation had to deal with, but he further "abandoned" me by becoming a long-distant trucker who was seldom home. My parents reinforced such feelings by sending me to my grandparents on the weekends when my father was home. I also felt strongly rejected in the last year of my grandfather's life when he sunk down into a sea of alcohol. My grandfather had been closer to me than my dad, but when he turned to constant drink he turned mean and berated me. 

These conditions at home combined with the bullying and rejection of my peers at that time contributed to me being a very troubled adolescent.

Dr. Carnes further outlined four core attributes leading to pornographic and sexual addiction.

1. The person believes they are basically bad and unworthy. I don't ever recall feeling I was a bad person, but I did often feel unworthy. I never felt I could live up to anyone's expectations: dad, teachers or other kids.

2. The person believes no one could love them as they were. This is certainly something I felt as a teen. I constantly complained no one would ever like me and no girl would ever date me. I was too skinny, I wore glasses and I was too shy. I wished all the time to be completely different than I was. I wanted to be tough and aggressive. I dreamed of being six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, because in a lot of what I read this was given as the ideal he-man. I did eventually obtain this dream. I grew to be six feet tall and in my thirties I reached 200 pounds and then some, and I will tell you I never want to cross that 200 pound boundary again. It wasn't being a he-man; it was just being hefty.

3. The person feels their needs will never be met if they must depend on others. This is exactly what happened to me. I did not trust anyone else. I preferred to work alone and  learn in secret because I feared ridicule if I failed in front of others. I also did not trust any kind of help from anyone. This self-dependance could have easily have gotten me killed. Since I feared my father's badgering to learn to swim, I went off alone one day to a lake when there was no other soul in sight. I walked to the deep end and I jumped in. That is how I learned to swim. Obviously I succeeded, because there was no one about to pull me out if I sank.

4.  The person believes sex is their most important need.  "When a child's exploration of sexuality goes beyond discovery to routine self-comforting because of the lack of human care, there is potential for addiction. Sex becomes confused with comforting and nurturing." For example, a lonely and abused 13-year-old finds comfort in masturbation and pornography. More and more, he or she uses that for solace. As years go by, the type of sexual acting out may change. It can involve promiscuity, affairs, and visiting massage parlors or prostitutes."

Here I divert from this last core rule. I never felt sex was my most important need. Perhaps because by the time I experienced sexual feelings I was already using writing as my escape. My writing had become the most important need by the time I was thirteen. But I did also find escape in sexual fantasy, although I still really didn't know much about sex. (This is not as weird as it sounds today, the idea that a boy age 13 to 15 could be very ignorant of sex. Sex information was not as common in the 1950s as now.) I suppose you could say I found comfort in pornography since I was then getting ahold of such magazines, but I knew nothing of masturbation at that time. I was indulging in some playacting that bordered on it, I suppose, but with no awareness of why my pretending to be captured by scantily clothed lady pirates (don't ask) made my body feel so good. I certainly never visited a massage parlor or a prostitute.

In the 1960s, when I became a regular at the adult bookstores, peep shows et al, I still didn't consider sex as the most important aspect of my life. I didn't indulge in any affairs since my relationship with my wife was just fine. We were not neglecting each other, and of course, my wife shared in some of this be going to the art and Burlesque theaters with me. In the summer we made regular visits to Atlantic City and we always went to the shows at the Globe.

I saw nothing wrong in such behavior. Who was being hurt? It was just pictures or performances. I was not having trysts with anyone. I never had sex with anyone else but my wife. By all worldly standards I was an exemplary husband. There was no cheating, no committing of adultery.

I emphasize none by worldly standards. God's standards are somewhat higher, but in those days I was an Atheist, so what God wanted didn't matter to me.

But by the 1970s my life was to become more tied up in both sex and Atheism. I was to become much more an activist in both. And in the meantime our dead children were piling up.

To be continued...

Getting Here Part VII: Hippie Writer

When I was twelve I decided to be a writer. I had some success with this in grade school and in sixth grade my friend Stuart and I published a newspaper, using the school's mimeograph to print it. Writing during junior high became an escape from the slings and arrows thrown my way by other kids and my resentment and fear of my father. Stories were a world I controlled and I could get lost in my imagination.

However, in high school something quite extraordinary happened. My writing made me popular. I was entertaining and funny and people didn't mind me being around. I did a poetry reading and a story reading. I became an actor in comic sketches written with two friends, I was a stand-up comic and a DJ at dances.

I wanted to pursue a career as a writer, but it wasn't encouraged. I was told I would get over such nonsence and what I needed was a job, a real job, which I got at ARCo. But I wrote every night anyway and sent manuscripts out to magazines. The year I married, as mentioned before, I won a runner-up in the Writer's Digest Writing Contest. (The story was called "Soldier, Soldier" and concerned two soldiers arguing over whether to desert their post.) In the next few years, as we lived our perfect little suburban life, not much was happening with my writing. I was writing a lot, but no one was buying. I was contacted by Scott Meredith (no relation, in fact his real name was Arthur Scott Feldman), to whom I had been recommended by the editor of Redbook. Scott Meredith was one of the most prominent literary agents of the time and his company still is. He represented such people as Norman Mailer, P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur C. Clarke, but I turned him down. This was probably one of the poorer decisions of my life.

But after we moved to my father-in-law's I began to find outlets. The first was as a ghostwriter for a number of people going to college. I wrote term papers, essays and speeches for a fee. (They got A's, so they got their money's worth.) The fellow who took over my old position in Addressograph was also going to community college and was the editor of of the school paper. He complained there wasn't enough talent to fill his paper and he hired me to write articles. I wrote these under the byline Loop because I wasn't really supposed to write for that newspaper not being a student of the school. On top of this I had a friend named Jane, a artist attending the Philadelphia Institute of Art. She kept trying to urge me to trust my talent and write full time, but I didn't, at least not right away. She and her boyfriend were black activists (later defecting to Cuba) and he was a photographer in the underground press that was popular in the sixties. Jane introduced me to an editor and I began writing in the Undergrown Press as "Eugene Lawrence". The picture top of this post is of the periodical.

In the meantime, Lois and I were developing a clique of friends, all with ambitions in the arts. They were writers, poets, artists, composers and actors. This was the beginnings of the "Decade of Peace and Love" and Hippies, which we were.  Our time was spend with these people in Jim's basement (that is Jim holding bongos in the picture with me) talking about the great things we were going to create while we drank Screwdrivers and smoked. If not at Jim's we would gather in Rittenhouse Square and hang around with the other street people all night. We frequented the coffeehouses (Trauma, Kaleidoscope, Main Point) or went to concerts, Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley, Elizabeth, Jim Kwiskin's Jug Band with Maria Muldour and many other groups of the time.

While our group continued to talk about doing, I started to get published more. I did some ads for the Philadelphia Enquirer and Daily news, my poetry was picked up by the radio program "Personal Poetry" and I got a regular gig writing articles for "Philadelphia After Dark."

Life was not going as well at home. Lois and I were having a hard time communicating under her father's roof. She went to work for Delaware County Hospital and met an orderly there. I found out and we decided to separate. I went home to ma and pa. I began to date other women, even went to a ski resort with one, but somehow I could not get any real feeling for anyone else. I also quit my job at ARCo to write a novel. I would go to Lois' father's place during the day with my portable typewriter (I still had a key) and then leave before her or her dad got home. I took a part time job with Philadelphia Gum.

I couldn't stand not being with Lois. I began to court her again and we went back together on the basis we move out of her father's. We moved to a cheap apartment in University City in Philadelphia. I left Philadelphia Gum with the move and she got a job as a secretary in the chemistry department of the University of Pennsylvania. We lived on her salary and my money from the ARCo Thrift Plan. Our apartment was small, had roaches, with a Hippie crash pad down the hall, a doped-up girl screaming in the hall some nights, a Black Panther group meeting in the lobby and a prostitute living above us. A perfect place for a Hippie writer who was just beginning to sell short stories to the pulp magazines under my own name.

We had registered to vote right after we moved. I listed my occupation on the form as Writer. Politically I was far left and I generally voted for third party candidates in those years. (I voted for Dick Gregory in the 1968 Presidential race.)

One day I came home and there was a subpoena in the mailbox. It accused me of registering to vote under false pretenses. It said a witness saw me engage in some kind of shenanigans with the registrar. The witness had a nearby address. I walked to it and found a vacant lot. It turned out hundreds of we University City residents had received these. Frank Rizzo was running for Mayor and was unpopular on college campuses. They were trying to take the college kids vote away and since I had simply registered as Writer they netted me as well. Our lawyer, supplied by the Democrat party (which is what I had registered as then) said we had to go to court or they would take away our right to vote.

I had just started working for North American Publishing as a circulation manager, although I talked them into letting me write book reviews for their education magazine, "Media & Methods". Now in my first week I had to take a day off and go to City hall to an overstuffed courtroom. It was July. There was standing room only and it was terrible hot. There was no actually judge. Committeemen of the Republican Party sat as Judges. They kept telling our lawyer to shut up. I looked about and most of the contested voters looked to be college kids, but not all. There was an old man with a long white beard (they subpoenaed Santa Claus) and a group of middle-aged Black women as well. The witnesses sat along one wall. My guess is they were paid off with a bottle of wine.

It was a long morning. At noon we were told by our lawyer that anyone with a valid Pennsylvania Driver's License with their current address should go to a clerk during the lunch break. If you had this, which I did, you would be dismissed and retain your vote. These things turned me sour on politics. Although in the two instances I cited last time and this were with the Republicans, I've had my taste of corruption with the Democrats as well. I don't particularly like politicians of any stripe today.

I was getting published regularly and Lois and I were closer than ever. Our group was beginning to break apart and we were spending less time hanging about in the park. We still made the coffeehouses every weekend, but these weren't my only hangouts during this period. The others were something else entirely.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here Part VI: Change is Blowin' in the Wind

1965 was a pivotal year. Time fired change our way with the rapidity of a machine gun. Rat-a-tat-tat, we were hit by another blast. We had lost our house, been threaten and moved in with my father-in-law, an uncomfortable situation. Within the course of those months I was to be drafted, have four separate jobs, something of a nervous breakdown, give up totally on religion and have a dust-up with the powers that ran Upper Darby. Change wasn't just blowin' in the wind, it was a bloomin' hurricane. No wonder we were wondering where in the world we were.

It wasn't long after we moved that President Johnson, near the end of August 1965, ordered the drafting of married men. (I wonder how many marriages that broke up? A number of men had rushed into marriage during the early years of the Vietnam War because marriage gave them a deferment.) Funny how the letter started off with "Greetings" as if it was a Christmas Card. I had to report to 401 North Broad Street for a pre-induction physical. I wasn't thrilled about this. I knew exactly where I would end up and it wasn't a safe place. However, to make a long story short, I suffered from psoriasis. It had appeared in childhood. At this time it was pretty light, but there was one patch on my shoulder and that was enough to get me classified as 1-Y. [Registrant available for military service, but qualified only in case of war or national emergency. Usually given to registrants with medical conditions that were limiting but not disabling (examples: high blood pressure, mild muscular or skeletal injuries or disorders, skin disorders, severe allergies, etc.).] I would have been the rare bird thanking God for a skin disease, except back then I didn't thank God for anything. In fact, around that time I pretty much dismissed God altogether from my life.

Lois and I began looking for a church. Things had obviously went a little south in our lives and suddenly we got interested in religion. But we weren't so much seeking God as a sanctuary from reality. We were looking for a warm and fuzzy place, not a Savior. After all, we were very nice people a bit down on our luck and in need of some commiseration.

We didn't find it. We didn't find anything. We started by visiting a number of "mainstream" churches in the area (Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopalian) and one big Methodist Church, even though we were trying to avoid the denominations of our parents, which were Methodist and Lutheran. These churches were not very welcoming. They were actually rather intimidating. No one spoke to us. Some people even glared at us. Was it my long hair? I don't know, but we distinctly felt unwelcome.

There was a large Roman Catholic Church a few blocks from where we lived then. I began to go there in the morning before work and attend Mass. I bought a book on Catholic beliefs, a Rosary, a miraculous metal. This was what religion should be, I thought, all this ritual and objects to handle. I felt since I was doing something I was earning my way to Heaven. We ( I talked her into it) decided to join the Catholic Church. I knew this would give both our families fits, but by this time I was doing a lot of stuff for just that reason, to gave my family fits.

But the night the Priest was supposed to meet with us to start the process he didn't show up. He stood us up without so much as a phone call.  So that was it for Catholicism. If the Priest doesn't care, why should we?

Our search didn't end here. We just moved a bit further from the religious center. The Unitarians were our next stop. I had no idea what that name meant, but a church was a church to me as long as it claimed to be Christian,  but that requirement ceased with the Unitarians. This was a church in downtown Philadelphia. We attended their service, but this was really a big pep rally for the next protest to be held. We sat on the floor in a big room and talked strategy for our march for civil rights or against the war or to save the earth or to save a rare flea endangered by a highway project, whatever was that particular weeks reason for anger. Now Lois and I were already getting involved in protests we didn't need more. This wasn't what we wanted from a church.

Having believed we had exhausted Christianity at this point, we turned to the Ethical Society. We went to their Sunday morning service. We entered and some music was played as in my old church, a kind of prelude. Some songs were sung at times as well, but none of this music was a hymn. They were Classical pieces. Someone said something corresponding to a prayer, but it was a poem. A text was read, but it was a piece by one of the great philosophers. A sermon was given focused on the greatness of mankind, saying that the problems of the world would eventually be solved by the technological advances made by man. Everything was on the unique quality of humans to do good and save the world, like humans had did such a wonderful job of that so far.

It was all I could do not to laugh. When we left I said it was a joke. If you don't believe in God and think mankind is the end-all and be-all, why are you parodying what could easily be a Methodist service, simply replacing anything that smacks of God with some human produced babble?

There were sudden changes in my work situation during the remainder of 1965 as well. I had been doing quite well and become the supervisor of my unit, but I had grown restless. I had also learned when I first took a job in this unit I had made a tactical error. It was a service division, not a clerical one. I learned from others this was a dead end. There was a stigma against people working in the service divisions and once there it was very difficult to get a position in the clerical areas, but those were the areas where advancement was possible. Of course, I was just eager to make some more money and was getting bored with what I was doing because it had become routine to me. I applied for and got a job as Traffic Control Clerk.

It was a grade level improvement and more money, but it was located in the back of a warehouse at the refining yards. My job was basically handling the paperwork and dispatching the various trucks in and out of the refinery. I was on the job two weeks and I had a breakdown. I am not certain why. Maybe the isolation and dreariness of my office, but more likely I was dealing with men much like my father. At any rate, I came to work one morning and I began to cry and I couldn't stop. Totally embarrassing, especially around the type of men I worked with there. But they didn't make fun of me. They were concerned and the boss sent me home.

I was sure my career at ARCo was done. I was depressed and worried and thought I would be fired. Personnel, (you know, what they call Human Resources today) called me back in after a week. They gave me a job as a Parcel Post Clerk back in the mailroom and told me I would be offered the next Level 6 job that opened. That was the Level of the Traffic Control job, so not only wasn't I fired, I wasn't even going to be demoted.

About a month later I was offered a position in Accounts Receivable. So in the course of less than two months I had been Supervisor of Addressograph, Traffic Control Clerk, Partial Post Clerk and Ledger Clerk.

Then that winter Lois announced she was pregnant again. The Doctor warned her to be careful. Given her history with the first baby and his examination, she had a number of problems that could put the pregnancy at risk.

Near Christmas there was a bad snowstorm. Two blocks away a stop sign was knocked down when a car skidded into it a couple weeks earlier during another storm. Despite the snow my parents came down to visit on Christmas. My father was a professional driver, snow didn't deter him. However, they almost had an accident because of the downed stop sign had still not been replaced. They had no way of knowing the traffic on the cross street didn't have to stop, because it looked like the street they were on was the right of way.

Then a few days later, Lois fell on a sidewalk nearby because it had never been shoveled and the snow had packed to ice. What angered me was this sidewalk was at the home of the Local Committeeman for the Republican Party, which at that time had a stranglehold on the government in the borough. It was the law that sidewalks be cleared of snow within 24 hours of the end of a snow storm. I had shoveled (picture on right is me in that 1965 snow doing just that). Everyone on our street had shoveled, except this politician.

My wife's family (she had several living on the street) were upset. They knew my wife's condition, plus they were also already angry because snowplows had plowed out the streets of the upper-income sections of the township, but not our streets, resulting in the trash trucks being unable to come thought and the garbage was piling up. They said we should all write letters to the Mayor complaining about this Committeeman and the lack of plowing. Well, you know how it goes, I wrote a letter and no one else did. I wrote about the stop sign and the trash and especially about my pregnant wife's fall.

Next thing I know the Committeeman is knocking on the door. He accused me of lying. Then he said I didn't even know where he lived. I said, "Come on" and led him outside and up the street to his house, which still hadn't been shoveled. He was furious. He called me a name and I though he was going to hit me, but he turned and stomped into his home.

Not long after my wife gets a tearful phone call from her aunt. Her uncle had a patronage job with Upper Darby, now someone in government called and said if her niece's husband didn't stop writing letters they were going to fire her husband. She begged Lois to tell me to shut up. I tried to get her family to band together, but in the end I stopped for their sake. This was not to be my last confrontation with bad politicians. (Probably why I don't like them much even today.)

My wife did end up losing that baby, too. It wouldn't be the last.

These winds of 1965 were to blow us in an entirely different direction in our lives and eventually to a very dark place.


TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here Part V: Desolation Row

The first few years of our life together went rather smoothly. Both of us were doing well on our jobs. There were promotions and raises. Outside of work we were enjoying something of the good life. Besides eating out regularly, going to dances at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown and plays at the Valley Forge Music Fair we traveled. We went to Gettysburg, toured Virginia and spend several days in New York staying at the Waldorf-Astoria (that is Lois pictured there on the left in 1962).

Also in the year we got married I won runner-up in the Writer's Digest Writing Contest. My desire was to become a self-sustaining author. I spent as much time writing as I could. Typically we would get home from work, have dinner and I would disappear into the den to write for the evening. I would come back down around ten and we would talk (or other things) until the wee hours of the morning. We were young, sleep didn't seem high on our list of things to do.

We could always talk. We talked most of the time on our dates. The other thing we could always do was sex. I was a virgin when we got engaged, but I admit I wasn't when we married. There was no way either of us could restrain ourselves for that whole year. We took any opportunity alone to go at each other. This sometimes had funny results. One time we were at my home and my mother and grandmother left for some church function. My dad was on the road somewhere. We waited until mom's car went down the road and then we began undressing. We just reached the state of au natural when we heard the kitchen door open and my mother coming through the house calling my name. We quickly began pulling on clothes. My mom knocked on my bedroom door and I had to let her in. She said they had forgotten something and then they left again.  At the time Lois wore a pair of leopard spotted pedal-pushers. I turned around with a sign of relief and saw her pants were on inside out.

So when Lois became pregnant two years after we married it was sooner than we wished, but hardly surprising. We were concerned about the financial implications, but these were outweighed by the prospect of parenthood.

In August 1963 Lois was home from work. I am not certain why she didn't go in that day. She was in her fifth month of term. I got a call from her later that morning. She said she was losing the baby and asked me to come home.  I asked if she had called the doctor.

"Yes, " she said, " I told him I was going into labor. He said that was impossible. He would send something from the drugstore for my pain and not to bother him again."

I said, "I'm coming home right away."

I said it, but knew right away was not going to happen. I left work immediately, but I still had to walk to the train station, catch the next train, which might mean up to a half hour wait and ride it for an hour, then drive the last few miles. When I finally walked in she was in our bedroom. I entered and she was shivering on the bed. There was blood.

"I'm sorry," she said and began to cry.

"Where is it?" I asked.

It was in the bathroom in a basin. It was a boy. We would have named him Sean.

I called the doctor and he came. He wasn't happy about coming. He went into the bedroom, was there a few minutes and came out.

"How is she?" I asked.

"She'll be fine," he said.

"What should we do with the baby?" I asked.

He brushed by me. "You can throw in the garbage for all I care," he said and left.

I was stunned. Lois went back to work in a few days, but she came home upset and depressed. Despite her own ordeal no one gave her much sympathy. They were too busy talking about and feeling sorry for Jackie Kennedy, who had just lost a premature baby two days after its birth.

Her depression was understandable, but it was a harboring of something that would increase as the years went by that had no relationship to this loss. It is still not clear if this physical loss was a factor in those that would be loss in the future.

Meanwhile, my life had also changed. A fellow my age had started working in my unit and we became friends. He had been going to Temple University on a football scholarship, but gotten injured and loss his grant. He couldn't afford the tuition, but he was now working during the day and going to college at night. I didn't know such a thing as evening college existed. I thought you had to go to a campus and live in a dorm and spend big bucks to attend university. He suggested I try it.

That summer I enrolled at Temple as a non-matriculating student. I took Introduction to Sociology with plans to major in that field if I though I could handle college. I got straight A's in the course and the professor told me I should definitely enroll that fall. I did, taking as many credit hours as allowed to a part-time student. By September I was working full time, often with overtime, and going to school three nights a week. I still tried to squeeze in writing everyday and keep up my time with Lois.

During this same year Ronald finished his term of service with the Army and moved back to the area. He took an apartment in a nearby town and invited Lois and me to dinner. We had a great evening talking about old times. Toward the end of the evening Ronald told us something which at first we didn't quite understand.  He said he had gone to a club in Philadelphia. The address had been given him by a friend. He didn't think he would go, but he did. There were only men in the club and during the night they danced with each other. He danced, too, and he enjoyed it and thought he would go back. He left it at that. It wasn't until Lo and I discussed this that we grasped what he was telling us.

I refused to believe it at first. When we were double-dating during high school I always thought Ron was the most awkward guy I had seen around girls, but I never thought it more than a deep shyness. Homosexuality was not talked about much in the period I grew up. I knew it existed. Guys at school would call someone they didn't like "queer" as the ultimate insult. The only other information I had was from sleazy magazines were homosexuals were either blackmailed or beaten up. I became concerned for Ronald, fearing these things would happen to him. I wrote him a letter. We had an exchange of letters and I in my naiveté and he in a period of sensitivity mistook what we said to each other and as a result stopped speaking.

At this time I discovered an odd thing. When I would get into a conversation with people at work I would begin to shake. I was all right when discussing business, but if the conversation turned to other things and became serious I felt my body was quivering and that I couldn't control my speech. I decided to do something about it and went to a clinic and met with a psychologist. I didn't tell my parents because they would have had a fit. Psychologists and psychiatrists were people only insane people visited. Anyone who went to one for therapy was stigmatized in their world. But I didn't feel this way. I knew I had to do something before this shaking I felt interfered with my job.

The Psychologist was almost a caricature. He resembled Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H (pictured right), the bushy hair and mustache. He wore jeans with one of those corded sports coats with the leather patches on the elbows. Invariably he would enter, sit down and plop his feet up on his desk. He wore these causal shoes with thick crepe soles. I did most of the talking. He asked if I had any recurring dreams. I said I often dreamt I was being chased by a bull or a gorilla. He said these dreams meant I hated my father. O-o-o-k-a-a-ay? My father and I didn't have the best relationship, but I didn't think I hated him. He really took interest when I mentioned buying several books on homosexuality. I explained about Ronald, my fears of what might happen to him and that I wanted to understand it. He decided my concerns about my long-time best friend indicated I was homosexual. If there was one thing  I knew for sure, I was not a homosexual. I stopped going to the clinic.

Oddly, my feelings of shaking during conversations stopped at that point.

These years, though, continued to be a yo-yo of ups and downs. Lois seemed to revive from her loss of Sean all right, but she was beginning to have some paranoia about the neighbors and an occasional bout of depression or migraine that laid her up. Then one day she came home and said she had been fired.

She said there was office politics going on and some manager were trying to "get her boss" and somehow that resulted in her being terminated. Whatever the reason, we now had a financial problem. Our income was more than cut in half because she was actually making more than I was. We went from having luxuries to not being able to meet our monthly bills. After several months we decided we had to sell the house.

We put the house up. There was a real estate slump at the time. Worse, we came under physical threat. A neighbor saw an African-American couple visit the house and the next thing we had a delagation of our "friendly" neighbors threatening to break all the windows in our house if we dared consider selling to a black person. I told our realtor we would sell to anyone who wanted to buy the place. This did not exactly ease the tension, but maybe it sped up the sale. The realtor suddenly found a white couple who purchased the house almost immediately after this confrontation. We sold at a slight loss.

We moved in with my father-in-law, possibly one of the biggest mistakes of my life, but we were naive and didn't know what else to do at the time. It was to be one more address on our journey down Desolation Row.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Getting Here Part IV: All-American Dream Couple

When I graduated high school most of my friends went their separate ways, except for Ronald. I had met Ronald in third grade, who became one of my few friends back in that town and he had remained so even when I moved away again. Through those years we had often double-dated, including my Senior Prom when he helped me take both my girlfriends by pretending one was his. (Okay, that's another story.) Now we sometimes searched for jobs together. (Ronald is on the right in the photo. He was 6 foot 4 in case your wondering.)

I don't think either of us graduated with great prospects. My parents had told me to forget college when I entered ninth grade. They didn't understand why I took Academic, since that was college preparatory. Part of their reasoning was financial, I suppose, but they really didn't believe in higher education, unless you planned to be a doctor. My mother constantly worried because I read a lot. Reading all those books would damage my brain, she once told me. Ronald's parents had also told him to forget college.

Ronald decided early on to join the Navy. This changed by accident to the Army later. He wanted me to join with him on the "Buddy System", but again  not being 21 interfered. My parents, especially my mom, were dead set against my joining the service and wouldn't sign the papers. (At 18 I was still considered a minor in those days.)

Ronald hit a snag at his physical requiring surgery before he would be accepted. His surgery resulted in complications that almost killed him.  He eventually recovered and did join the Army. Meanwhile I went to IBM School in Philadelphia.

I had been studying Commercial Art through a correspondence course since my Junior Year. I had talked my mother into this and she paid for it on the promise we never tell my father. My dad took a dim view of both my writing and my drawing. So why did they loosen up and allow me to go to IBM School? It was because this involved running machines. To them running machines was real work; writing, art and that stuff you learned in college was not.


Florence Utt IBM School was a six week course in programming, wiring and operating everything from a 024 Keypunch to a 604 Calculator and a lot of three digit numbers in-between. I graduated at the top of the class.

This accomplishment did not get me a job. I eventually landed a position as a Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting with the Atlantic Refining Company (Later known as Atlantic-Richfield or ARCo). Why is this important in this series of my becoming a Christian? It is because it set up the next phase of my life and the events that led to that conclusion.

Not long after I began my job I began dating this little red-haired Irish lass who worked on the same floor. (When I say little, I am not talking figuratively. Pat [pictured left] was four foot ten and that may have been with heels.)  Despite this height difference, I was six foot, we seemed compatible in every other way, although there was one I overlooked as unimportant. She was Roman Catholic.

One morning I came to work and she stopped me in the hallway. She told me she couldn't see me anymore. Her parents forbade her because I wasn't Catholic. I was angry. Why should that matter, I was still "Christian". "It wasn't any of her parent's business", I told her.

She ran into the ladies' room.

A few seconds later this tall dark-haired Irish lass came out of the ladies room and approached me. (This girl was a foot taller than Pat at five foot ten.) "What's wrong with Pat," she asked me. "She's in there crying her eyes out." This girl also worked on the same floor, the sixteenth, and she always said hello to me when we passed in the hall. I always said hello back, but I was shy and a low talker and she never heard me. She told me later that she thought I was the most stuck-up guy on Earth. Her name was Lois. (Pictured right. She was only one-quarter Irish. She was two-quarters German and one-quarter Native America - Creek.) Her family was Lutheran.

None of that particularly mattered to me. She had been kind and she was good-looking and so whether that day or the next I forget, I went down the elevator with her and walked along down Broad Street. At her subway stop, just before she entered the turnstile I asked her to go out next Saturday. I figured if she said no then she would go through to the platform and I'd continue on to the train station and there would be no period of awkward embarrassing silence.

She was coming out of a rough period. Her mother and best friend both died around the time she graduated high school. She was, like me, an only child and there were some similarities in our childhood. She had been forced to go church and didn't want to and her father was constantly ridiculing her, saying she walked like an elephant or she was homely (which she wasn't and in fact had been a teenage model, left). He also told her she couldn't go to college, because college was a waste of time for girls. They only went to find a guy anyway. (She went on her own to Peirce College and earned her Associates.) Her parents were more restrictive than mine. Appearance was very important to them and she not only had to go to church and be in the proper clubs, but was constantly warned about behaviors that might reflect badly on her parents, drinking, sex, etc. This probably was part of reason she began smoking at age twelve.

We went out that Saturday night and yadda-yadda-yadda just before we got married we bought a house.

However dysfunctional our growing up we meshed well as a couple. As adults we were the All-American Dream Couple. (Well, almost adults anyway. One hitch came up at settlement on the house when everyone discovered we were just a couple of teenagers not yet legal age. But it got resolved and we got the house.)

How many people from basically lower-middle class blue-collar families had the start we did?  We entered marriage with a new car (Studebaker Lark) and a new house (four-bedroom Cape Cod atop a hill with a great view of The Great Valley). We both had jobs that paid above average for those days, even if we were in low level positions. Together our salaries not only met our mortgage and expenses, but afford us the pleasures of eating out weekly at good restaurants and yearly vacation trips. I even had it mapped out how much money we'd have in the bank when we turned thirty.

The house was halfway between our families, so there would be no jealousy that we favored one over the other. More important to us was the distance was enough there'd be no regular pop-ins by either side either. And once married no one was going to make us go to church. Church ended when we walked up the aisle after saying our I dos. (Photo on left: Our first Christmas in our first home together, December 1961. We were both 20 years-old.)

Life was great, what more could one want? What could possibly go wrong?


TO BE CONTINUED...